“My name is Unimportant–Samuel Unimportant.”

I’m a glutton for punishment, it turns out. If any gamebook has an interesting premise, I’m sold, and will instantly seek it out even AFTER learning that the series was never actually playtested before release, and in spite of ridiculously spendy pricetags. I’ll do just about anything for my readers short of wearing a dress or eating balut.

So… Expensive + Janky + Unusual Theme = Gamebook Shack Fodder.

Horror Classics is a short-lived horror gamebook series—a whoppin’ TWO volumes were produced before it went kaput. Each book is based on a work of classic horror literature, and the gimmick is you can play as the hero OR the monster. The series follows the Fighting Fantasy trend of solo RPG books: you jump between countless paragraphs describing the action while occasionally fighting enemies, collecting goodies, and trying not to get hopelessly lost.

Right out of the gate, I’m left wishing there were other entries besides Dracula’s Castle and The Curse of Frankenstein. How cool would it be to have a third volume based on The Invisible Man? Or The Creature from the Black Lagoon? But I digress.

The first volume is Dracula’s Castle, by J H Brennan, author of GrailQuest. I’ve never read the GrailQuest books, but I took this to mean that I was hopefully dealing with a veteran of the genre…despite having read on Demian’s Gamebook Bonanza that the author admitted to never playtesting Horror Classics to see if they worked properly. The book opens with a very spooky and atmospheric prologue: a mysterious, brooding figure enjoys a coach ride to Castle Dracula, with some ominous purpose in mind. This does an excellent job setting the tone for the book (and getting my hopes up high enough to dash them to millions of tiny little pieces, but I’m getting ahead of myself). After setting the stage, the book introduces you to the game mechanics and how the book is structured, before continuing on to a second prologue where you decide who you will play as: vampire hunter Johnathan Harker, come to slay the evil count; or Dracula himself, hunting the humans who have invaded his home.

I like how the book is structured. There’s a Location section and an Action section.

The Action section is the main body of the book you’ll be reading, but each “act” you turn to will have a location reference number to check in the Location section, which has detailed descriptions of all the locations where events happen.

In theory when you move to a new location, you read its Location entry before continuing on to your current Action section. Sometimes the act you just turned to will link to the narrative of the Location’s description. It’s a nice little immersive feature.

The adventure system for Dracula’s Castle is pretty detailed and has a lot of potential. You have your standard Life Points, to keep track of how beaten up you are. You also have five attributes: Speed, Courage, Strength, Skill, and PSI. You determine your attributes by rolling a 6-sided die, and hope you don’t roll a 1 or 2 for something important (like I frequently did).

PSI is used for special abilities, which I’ll get to later. The other four attributes are often used in combination. For example, Speed and Courage are combined to decide who acts first in a fight (it makes sense: you can be the nerviest guy on the planet, but it doesn’t help much if you trip over your own feet). Strength and Skill are combined to determine how much damage you do when you hit your enemy (roll 2 dice and land a blow if you get 6 or above). So you roll to see who goes first, then trade blows with the enemy and hope you hit him more often than he hits you. It’s simple, but it works, and I think I like it better than the base Fighting Fantasy combat system. I’m surprised Speed wasn’t used for retreating, though. If you want to flee from a fight, you just roll 2 dice and get a 9-12 to retreat to the previous section, taking a free hit for 2x damage as you go, which kind of makes it pointless to do anything but finish what you start.

It should be noted that you have to keep track of a lot of things in this book, so you’ll want to utilize a few bookmarks to track your current Action section, current location, and the section you just vacated. Maybe one for the Secrets Section, too, since you have to remember to roll a 9-12 in order to search for shortcuts to other areas, and you won’t be prompted to search in the Action section.

The Secrets Section in my copy consists of its title page and nothing else, and there doesn’t appear to be empty space suggesting pages were torn out. Perhaps one edition of the book lacked this section? I had to steal a picture of the Secrets Section from Archive Dot Org to show you what the chart looks like.

There are notable differences between the two playable characters that make the gameplay very different. From their starting points (the castle gates for Harker, the crypts for Dracula) they take very different paths through the castle while utilizing the same Locations.

Harker and Dracula each have unique abilities related to PSI which are assigned at the beginning of their respective adventures. For example, Harker can bless his weapon to do more damage (a spell called “Beautification” of all things), and Dracula can teleport in and out of his crypt (and actually HAS to in order to begin the game—being a vampire really sucks). You can spend 1 point of PSI to use your abilities. If you run out, you can still use PSI, but you spend 20 Life Points instead!

They heal in different ways, too. Harker automatically heals 3 Life Points every time he enters a new Location, which is handy and probably easy to cheese. He can also use medicine or “natural healing” to speed up the healing process at the risk of losing even more life. Dracula’s game mode is definitely harder since he cannot use any of these abilities: in fact, he LOSES 2 Life Points every time he enters a new Location! He can only heal by feeding on the human intruders he encounters in his castle.

So I got my character rolled up, and I was fully immersed in this spooky castle setting, and I was excited to get started. And that’s where the book rapidly took a turn for the Goosebumps.

The moment I began Harker’s narrative and discovered that he was carrying a copy of GrailQuest, I knew I was in trouble. It’s not long before all the spooky, immersive atmosphere of the prologue chapters comes unraveled like a discount Christmas sweater. Dracula’s Castle combines the worst elements of two gamebook worlds: Goosebumps’s habit of going for comedy so as not to scare the kids, despite advertising itself as a scary series; and Fighting Fantasy’s trend of navigating dozens of one-sentence paragraphs where nothing happens and you feel like you’re walking in circles, before being abruptly killed in an impossible fight.

So here’s how my first session as Harker went. After stumbling in several such circles on a forest path, my first encounter was with a goofy, sardonic monk who clumsily tried to tackle me at the belltower ruins. I agreed to let him travel with me, and it turned out he was Grigori Rasputin of all people, and he could heal me after every fight, which was nice. I had to wonder if he’d gotten lost on his way to a sillier gamebook.

Then I fought an evil horse and came away with only half my health, just in time to get into another fight with an undertaker named Unimportant (yes, that’s his actual name, all for the sake of a vaudeville gag) who acts like the Mad Hatter and even hosts a tea party of corpses before randomly turning into a morlock and nearly murdering me.

Then I went to the stables, which turned out to be wolf kennels, not stables at all, where I rolled to see how many wolves I had to fight. I rolled a 5 and immediately got et. Wait, what’s this? I turn to a specific chapter when I die? I get an epilogue after death?! Very nice.

I’m not usually a fan of the solo RPG type gamebooks given how tedious they can get whenever a fight begins. It’s an issue I always had with Fighting Fantasy, since death instantly ends your adventure and forces you to roll up a new character. As tedious and unfair the combat was in Cretan Chronicles, it at least had specific chapters to turn to if you failed, rather than simply ending the story (although if you lose all your honor, the story abruptly ends as you kill yourself in shame). I was pleased to discover that Horror Classics has a unique chapter for each protagonist when they die.

So I turned to Harker’s death sequence.

Where he quite literally goes to Heaven and says, “Screw this, Dracula isn’t dead yet! I’m going back!”

…SIGH……

So yeah, Dracula’s Castle starts out promising as a detailed and immersive horror adventure (with some spooky comic-book-style artwork courtesy of Tim Sell), but almost immediately begins to offload one immersion-breaking tonal shift after another. Things aren’t much better when you play as Dracula, who incidentally has already killed Harker, and is now hunting Van Helsing inside his castle for some reason. Why not make it Harker and retain internal consistency? The host of Gamebook Odyssey suggests that since Dracula’s adventure is listed first (i.e. the odd-numbered chapters), I’m expected to complete Drac’s adventure first and kill off Van Helsing; thus Harker responds by dropping in to kill me in retaliation…except Dracula just killed Harker, so how could he…?

Hang on, my brain needs to reboot for a minute.

Apparently Dracula has to find a dozen or so keys to unlock the final boss fight, which means exploring every inch of the castle with my health slowly depleting and no heals besides the blood of my enemies. So if I quit the book prematurely, I’m really not missing much… although it’s pretty cool that the upstairs hallway has twelve numbered doors that can be entered depending which keys you’ve accumulated. If you remember how to get back there, you can return anytime to test out any new keys you’ve found.

But when I discovered that Dracula’s bathroom was covered in silly public restroom graffiti (including ANOTHER GrailQuest advertisement), I got tired of the whole thing and called it a day. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an author who holds contempt for his own audience.

It’s almost as if one author wrote the opening chapters, and then Brennan took over and decided to make it an R L Stine novel. If he’d planned to make Dracula’s Castle so silly, he should’ve started on that note right from Paragraph One, instead of setting me up for a truly spooky time, only to pull the rug out from under me. And apparently Brennan is notorious for injecting this kind of stupid “humor” into his books. I will never understand the mentality of authors who set out to write scary stories for young readers without actually making them scary.

This gamebook could have been brilliant even with its maze-like structure and punishing difficulty, if only it had stuck with the dark and moody tone throughout. As it is, it’s just a Goosebumps offshoot with Christopher Lee’s Brother on the cover. I can only hope that the follow-up, The Curse of Frankenstein, is at least tonally consistent.

Time for bed. Uncle Mac out.